Both Gallo and Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after completing their medical-training internships. Both were at some time promoted to Head of one of the NIH’s Laboratories, and Fauci was later again promoted to Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As Laboratory Heads and Institute Directors, the supervision of scientific research was naturally a central responsibility.
Gallo left NIH after charges of scientific misconduct and founded an Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Robert Gallo has been dishonest as well as incompetent [1].
He had been among the horde of virologists trying to find viruses that cause human cancers, after research funds to that end became available when President Nixon declared his war on cancer. That continued the cornucopia of funds for research overall that began after WWII — from ~$250 million pre-WWII to ~$2 billion just from federal sources by the mid-1950s, reaching $63 billion by 1989 (pp. 63-4 in [2]). By the 1970s, the exploding demand for research support had brought cutthroat competition to the detriment of judgments of quality (p. 17ff. in [3]).
There followed a general failure to discover any human-cancer-causing viruses, and the present consensus seems to be that cancers originate in mutations of particular “oncogenes”. But there is no uniformity in the genetic mutations found in any given type of cancer, so more attention is again being given to the hypothesis favored by Peter Duesberg, that cancers begin when cells reproduce in a faulty manner, with aberrations in the number of chromosomes (“aneuploidy)” [4], so that no two cancers of a given organ are likely to show exactly the same genetic mutations.
No matter the global failure to discover any human-cancer-causing virus, Robert Gallo claimed that clusters of leukemia in some areas of Japan had ben caused by a human-cancer-causing retrovirus, human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV, later re-named HTLV-1). The claim turned out to be spurious, since <1% of people carrying it ever contract leukemia, but the claim remains widely cited as a genuine discovery (pp. 125-7 in [2]).
Gallo continued to claim discovery of new retroviruses of the HTLV family, culminating in HTLV-3 as the claimed cause of AIDS; “The rationale is not obvious, however, since both of the first two HTLVs (HTLV-1 and HTLV-2) were said to cause leukemia, in which there is excessive proliferation of the same sort of cells that in AIDS are depleted” (p. 197 in [5]). Moreover, Gallo had found the virus in only 26 of 72 AIDS patients [6]. Even worse, it turned out that Gallo had misappropriated as his own, a sample of virus sent him by Luc Montagnier; and Gallo was found guilty of misconduct by the Office of Research Integrity [1].
Although Gallo himself continues to claim co-discovery of HIV [7], no knowledgeable observer agrees with him; that includes the Nobel-Prize Committee, which awarded the prize to Luc Montagnier and his colleagues without any mention of Gallo [8]. He and other members of his laboratory have been found guilty in a large number of cases of downright dishonesty, some of them prosecuted as criminal (p. 161ff in [2]).
Robert Gallo deserves to be described as a very successful charlatan and confidence-man; his self-description of “Six Decades in Science” [7] would be laughable had he not gotten away with so much. As Kary Mullis observed, in science one presumes that what a peer (colleague or competitor) says is true; but “If Gallo says something, it’s probably wrong” [9]; thus in 1984 Gallo had predicted an anti-HIV vaccine within a couple of years (p. 164 in [5]), something not achieved even 40 years later.
Gallo could also be a bully, as when, after a negative article about him, he “said to Celia Farber, ‘You seem like a nice girl—and you seem to have your head on straight — and I want to advise you that this is no way to make a career for yourself . . . by attacking and criticizing’” (p. 174 in [5]).
Gallo’s own memoir reveals a lack of understanding of science, and insistence — among other illogicalities — that HIV causes AIDS even though it is not easily transmissible (p. 156, 235, 243 in [5]).
Gallo’s lack of training in research can certainly not be held responsible for his dishonesty, but had he been better trained he might not have needed to be quite so dishonest in trying to achieve his ambitions.
The flaws in science by Anthony Fauci, on the other hand, can legitimately be ascribed, at least in significant part, to lack of research-training experience.
In (sort of) defense of Fauci
Anthony Fauci has been wrong about HIV from the beginning, and about other matters as well. As leader of a laboratory dealing with the immune system, and later of the whole Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NIAID), he had been in a position to do better; for instance, to sense something wrong with the “virus” cause of AIDS, given such early data as that the geographic distribution of HIV and of AIDS did not match, that young women all over the United States were as likely to be HIV-positive as young men, that racial disparities in testing HIV positive were unlike anything with other infectious diseases, and more [5].
One might also have qualms about something like nepotism, since Fauci’s wife also held a responsible position in the National Institutes of Health; and published a book about HIV [10] that does not mention her being married to Fauci.
Like Gallo, Fauci warned journalists not to make or report criticisms of official actions or statements: “Peter Duesberg’s theory that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. . . I laughed at that for a while…. Journalists who make too many mistakes, or who are too sloppy, are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish” [11].
Both Gallo and Fauci refused to attend scientific meetings if Duesberg was also on the program [12].
However, it is hardly Fauci’s fault that he was promoted beyond his capabilities, something sufficiently common as to have been given a name (the Peter Principle [13]). The lesson is that those who choose people for responsible positions in NIH ought to pay more attention to the need for understanding research and the history of science and medicine rather than purely medical training. Fauci himself may have some inkling of his deficiencies, since he reportedly rejected several offers to head NIH as a whole [14]; and in recent interviews he has acknowledged being wrong about masking and distancing during the COVID epidemic; and he has acknowledged that flu and COVID vaccines do not prevent infection, and that better vaccines against respiratory viruses are needed [15].
Fauci’s possible lapses in ethical conduct are also unfortunately not particularly uncommon, even at the level of the Supreme Court. The harm caused by his mistakes about HIV remind of the damage brought about by the well-intentioned McNamara and his “whiz kids” in advising as to the Vietnam War, owing in some part to trusting the wrong people.
Gallo is an instance of the occasional “bad apple” in medical matters and bureaucratic affairs in general; Fauci just illustrates the deficiencies of dogmatic, mainstream orthodoxy, which dismisses competent criticisms out of hand and lets hubris overwhelm warranted uncertainty and humility.
It is far from easy to do good science. It is very far from easy to do good medical science, as history demonstrates overwhelmingly. Well-intentioned individuals, basing themselves on contemporary knowledge, have at times caused considerable harm to considerable numbers of people. That is the human condition and the human tragedy: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions based on faulty facts can bring on catastrophes. Unfortunately, true facts are not easy to come by. Human beings who are sometimes mistaken, who go wrong accidentally and not intentionally, do not deserve be blamed or prosecuted for that.
Robert Gallo was demonstrably dishonest; there is no evidence that Anthony Fauci has been anything but sometimes, even maybe too often, mistaken.
Yet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., through the Children’s Health Foundation, has levelled that charge of deliberate dishonesty, and worse, at Fauci [16].
With friends like these . . .
We cannot choose those who might publicly agree with us, any more than we can choose those who publicly criticize us.
Many people, including a number of highly competent molecular biologists and other scientists, have over the years pointed, as have I [17], to the clear evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS. Kennedy’s book [16] may be right about HIV, AIDS, and a few vaccines, but I disagree with almost everything in that book and would much rather have no possible association with it. Since I was blogging about Anthony Fauci, however, I felt an obligation to say something about the book.
Nothing in it offers any evidence that any mistakes or errors of judgment made by Fauci, Gates, and others were intentional, let alone constitute a “global war on democracy and public health”. Moreover, in at least one outrageously inexcusable example, Fauci is baselessly accused of recommending to his own personal benefit the use of remdesivir to treat COVID even though the drug had been found “hideously dangerous” when tested against Ebola virus (p. 63 in [16]).The book claims that “6 months into the Ebola study, the trials Safety Review Board suddenly pulled both remdesivir and ZMapp from the trial”.
But the reference cited for that claim [18] says nothing of the sort. The trial used the reduction of Ebola mortality by ZMapp as the control for testing other medications. Remdesivir was found to be no better than, and roughly comparable to, ZMapp (53.1% mortality vs. 49.7%), whereas two other medications brought better, higher, reductions in mortality, so the trial was continued with only those two medications. ZMapp and remdesivir may have “ suddenly” been “pulled”, but it was because they were less effective, not because they were toxic. That’s what the press release stated, correctly citing the published article [19].
Yet the Kennedy book says that “54% of the remdesivir group died — the highest mortality rate among the four experimental drugs”, citing Table 2 in [19], giving the entirely false impression that the drug caused the mortality when in truth it just decreased mortality less than the other drugs.
Kennedy also cites as remdesivir’s “lethal side effects . . . multiple organ failure, septic shock, and hypotension”. However, Table 7 in the supplemental material for the article, listing adverse events experienced during the trial, reports that of a total 27 events, only 9 were in the remdesivir-treated group, and only one of those, a case of hypotension, was even “possibly related” [emphasis added] to the drug rather than to the infection being treated.
Believe anything in Kennedy’s book at your peril. The mis-citation just described is so detailed, and so contrary to the actual content of the cited work, that it can hardly be anything but intentionally, deliberately misleading.
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[1] John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002
Jon Cohen, “HHS: Gallo guilty of misconduct”, Science, 259 (1993) 168-170; DOI: 10.1126/science.8380653
[2] Peter H. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery, 1995
[3] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017
[4] Peter Duesberg, “Chromosomal chaos and cancer”, Scientific American, May 2007, pp. 53-9
[5] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[6] Robert C. Gallo, et al., “Frequent detection and isolation of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and at risk for AIDS”, Science, 224 (1984) 500-503
[7] “About Dr. Robert C. Gallo”; https://www.ihv.org/about/about-dr-robert-c-gallo
[8] “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008”; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2008/summary
[9] Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Pantheon, 1998
[10] Christine Grady, The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventive HIV Vaccine (Medical Ethics), Indiana University Press, 1995
[11] Anthony Fauci, “Writing for my sister Denise”, AAAS Observer, 1 September 1989, p.4
[12] Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, Fourth Estate, 1996, p. 147
[13] Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, William Morrow, 1969
[14] Denise Grady, “Not his first epidemic: Dr. Anthony Fauci sticks to the facts”, New York Times, 8 March 2020 (updated March 11); https://web.archive.org/web/20200315113453/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/health/fauci-coronavirus.html
[15] David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger & Anthony S. Fauci, “Perspective: Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenza viruses, and other respiratory viruses”, Cell Host & Microbe, 31 (2023) 146-157
[16] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Skyhorse, 2021
[17] Henry H. Bauer, “The Case against HIV” (October 2013,, updated December 2017); https://thecaseagainsthiv.net
[18] “Investigational Drugs Reduce Risk of Death from Ebola Virus Disease”, November 27, 2019; https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/investigational-drugs-reduce-risk-death-ebola-virus-disease
[19] Sabue Mulangu et al., “A randomized, controlled trial of Ebola Virus Disease therapeutics”, New England Journal of Medicine, 381 (2019) 2293-2303
Modern science requires lots of money. That money is mostly provided by governments and corporations, not charitable institutions. That means ideological and financial interests trump pure scientific enquiry. That is why science has migrated from benefiting to harming society. There is no easy way back, as the controllers of science are wealthy and entrenched. The history of medicine has been marked by the discovery of infectious agents and the treatments for them, which made the discoverers heroes and famous (e.g., Pasteur, Koch, Fleming). The temptation for those like Gallo to join this group of heroes (and possibly get rich with grants and patents) is significant. Find an organism, connect it to a disease and, presto, fame and wealth.